> Compare Lua to JS for example which started out similarly but Lua was kept simple and stable, while JS introduced massive churn and tooling complexity, much of it being unnecessary in my eyes.
Anything you wrote in JS twenty years ago probably still works. Tooling has changed, but none of that's an official part of the JS language. The language has only some added features that you can opt to not use.
If you're comparing the whole JS ecosystem to the Lua and Fennel languages, well that's not really a fair comparison.
For a solo developer, you can opt not to use any of the new features of JS.
But if you are working in industry and do some front-end programming… You are going to work with the features that other people around you have decided makes their life easier.
It is possible to work with like-minded souls that want to keep JS simple, but it certainly isn’t a given.
And there are examples in the JS ecosystem that prove me wrong to some extent like htmx, which is a small, simple library written in a straight forward style.
But it’s not entirely unfair either. Reading code is an important part of programming. Integration with libraries often too. You can’t just isolate yourself from churn that easily when everyone else doesn’t. Breaking changes, versioning issues, deprecation etc. happen regardless.
Anything you wrote in JS twenty years ago probably still works. Tooling has changed, but none of that's an official part of the JS language. The language has only some added features that you can opt to not use.
If you're comparing the whole JS ecosystem to the Lua and Fennel languages, well that's not really a fair comparison.